Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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Like all punks, Pussy Riot are insufferable snobs – but that shouldn't be a crime

Pussy Riot's closing statements in their trial for blasphemy confirmed that they have not only inherited the original punk movement's thrashing guitars and in-yer-face sensibility; they have also effusively embraced its art-school snobbishness.

Punk, in its original incarnation, was always as much a screech of rage against the "sheeple" as it was a two-fingered salute to the powers-that-be. Think Johnny Rotten wailing "They made you a moron!" in the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen". "Don't be told what you want / Don't be told what you need", sang Rotten, expressing the core belief of punk – that the vast bulk of the masses, effectively everyone except the punks, had been moulded into a moron by the man.

The same snobbish thinking animates Pussy Riot today. In her closing statement, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova bemoaned the "enforced civic passivity of the bulk of the population" in Russia. She said the Russian regime "easily manipulates public opinion" – which sounds like an attack on the regime but it is also a sly salvo against the Russian masses, who must have minds like putty if they can be so easily manipulated. In contrast to this civil slavishness, Pussy Riot are all about "authentic genuineness and simplicity", said Tolokonnikova.

Maria Alyokhina went further, using her closing statement to have a pop at the "automated masses". Russian people now "live as automatons", she said; they have been trained by the regime "not to pose the crucial questions consistent with their age". "They no longer have a sense of themselves as citizens. They have a sense of themselves simply as the automated masses", Alyokhina continued.

Things are now so bad, she said, that if someone were to arrive at the home of the average Russian citizen and say "we're going to raze your house to make room for a bureaucrat's residence", the people inside would "obediently collect their belongings, collect their bags, and go out on the street, and stay there precisely until the regime tells them what they should do next". Why? Because Russian citizens are now "completely shapeless", said Alyokhina, having been "inculcated [with] cruelty and non-conformity".

Pussy Riot's core political belief – if you can call it political – is that the "shapeless" mass of the population is automated, obedient and unquestioning, whereas Pussy Riot and its metropolitan supporters are enlightened and "genuine", being somehow immune to that top-down process of mind manipulation that Putin is allegedly carrying out. It echoes, eerily, the outlook of the "new intelligentsia" of early 20th-century Europe, as exposed in John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses, which likewise sought to distinguish between the refined sensibilities of a clever elite and the dumb emotionalism and coarseness of the lower orders.

Now we can see why Pussy Riot are so popular among many liberal opinion-formers here in the West – it is because both share a view of the little people as less culturally sophisticated and more easily forced into conformism than the commenting, bohemian, punkish sets. But of course, making snobbish statements and singing rubbish songs should not be a crime. Pussy Riot should be freed from prison immediately and allowed to continue expressing their loathing of Putin's regime and their disgust with the Russian masses.